Although Internet commerce today is both easy and powerful, effort spent and time lost searching the Internet for product and service pricing and availability presents a major detraction and can cause online purchasing often to be fraught with difficulties. Although finding a low price is very important to Internet buyers and often a major factor in the online purchasing decision, other parameters are also very important, such as vendor reliability and security. Many online buyers would sacrifice saving and forgo the lowest price, or may even pay more, in order to ensure a secure transaction and prompt shipping of the desired items or services.
In addition, a new generation of wireless computing products is coming to market with substantial memory capabilities and wireless interfaces, such as cellular and Wi-Fi™, to remotely communicate with the Internet that can enable electronic commerce between a user and a website in a remote manner. Many users are carrying consumer payment providers are now using mobile phones as a payment device by enabling the user to simply transmit payment information to a terminal directly from the wireless device to pay for an item. The mobile phone can also include a personal database with exceptional wireless connectivity and the ability to store vast amounts of digital information.
Internet consumers often will purchase items after obtaining information about products and services from other consumers by word of mouth. This information may include price, quality and reliability of goods or services, and shipping, warranty, transaction security and other information that the consumer generally can not readily obtain from a vendor by, for example, inspecting the vendor's webpage. Moreover, the vendor's website information often can be difficult to navigate, place pertinent information on remote pages and provide information that may vary in accuracy with regard to the actual customer experience.
Consumers do not wish to perform exhausting amounts of searching by reading countless reviews, blogs and consumer review sites, may of which often charge a fee to access relevant information, to obtain this information. This is true especially if friends or consumers located close by already have this information.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a wireless mobile business method that remedies these known problems in the art.